Ray, A Hundred Years On

This film auteur gave us a spectacular oeuvre which distilled contemporary times

- Sharmistha Gooptu

In a recent interview marking the 100th birth centenary of Satyajit Ray, three days from today, his son Sandip Ray stated that if his father was alive perhaps he would have remade the political satire Hirak Rajar Deshe, the sequel to his magical Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. Hirak Rajar Deshe was made shortly after the state of Emergency of the 1970s, and the implications of Ray scion’s statement are hard to miss. Yet, for long, Ray was critiqued by members of the leftist avant-garde for not being political enough, for not using his cinema more directly to address the raging political issues of the day.

Ray made his Calcutta trilogy, starting with Pratidwandi, where he viewed the world around him through the eyes of the disoriented youth of 1970s Bengal. Unemployment, lack of opportunity, the specter of political violence and the breakdown of society, and the dissipation of old values were the subjects of his subsequent films. Yet, Ray continued to think of himself as a humanist and an artist par excellence in the traditions of the Bengal renaissance, a movement for liberal values and literary and artistic advancement that incorporated his own grandfather Upendrakishore and father Sukumar Ray, the latter producing a brilliant oeuvre of limericks and satire in his short lifespan.